An Ocean in a Well, a collection of 10 stories by D Ravikumar, translated from Tamil by V Ramakrishnan dwells on the personal and political, emotional and practical, straightforward and symbolic, ethereal and real with equal rigour. The opening story Thambi is about a young, homeless man who bites the hand that feeds him. Stories ‘Fact Finding’ and ‘A Death and Some More’ portray how caste-based violence is rife even today when ‘development’ is the loudest mantra. ‘Zha, the Unique letter’, a satirical take on today’s language wars shows how the state alters the definition of ‘sedition’ to further its agenda. The usage of Tamil letter ‘zha’ is banned in this story and the author subtly shows how this seemingly innocuous step thwarts the language itself.
Stories ‘An Ocean in a Well’, ‘Untimely’, ‘The Moon Pond’ that delve into man-woman relationship - of a mother who speaks to her son with her eyes, of lovers who meet briefly one last time before going opposite ways, of a man & a woman who share dreams and exchange poems are top favorites. The emotions in here wring your heart and the evocative descriptions of land, air and water elevate the reading experience. ‘The Word’, more like an essay, went over my head. On writers, avid readers, biblioklepts, the story ‘The Theory Concerning Theft’, pretty interesting, made me look up details of author Jean Genet.
Be it in dealing
with a cultural innuendo in the story ‘Kulfi’ or in rendering a natural
or emotional scape, the translation is excellent giving us readers pellucid
prose. Just a comparison, a line and a poem from ‘The Moon Pond’ would
suffice as proof -
“Hearing him speak always felt like reading a translated novel. The foreignness of his language was enchanting. It was impossible to fix his locale from his speech. It was a fusion of various dialects.
‘.. do not try to recollect, for you are your memory’.
‘All inventions have their origin in words;
We are but their tributaries.
They label us firmly as we label them.
Words of joy, words of misery,
Words of rejection, words of hope,
words for things, words for people,
Words for the universe, and words for nothing.
And behind it all, there is life, tranquil or
tough,
with death waiting to spring on you anytime….’
Writing, both an act of resistance and catharsis, can assuage strong emotions on one hand & keep the inner fire burning on the other. That the written word can break boundaries and tackle reductionist ideas is what the author D Ravikumar firmly believes in. In his note at the start of this collection of ten of his stories, he writes ‘The stereotypes created about a race on social, political and cultural levels play an important role in keeping that race enslaved.’ He shares that the notion that Dalits couldn't create complex creative works and had only their life stories to tell, reinforced by what was written, translated and published until then, irked him and gave birth to these stories. The book, published under the aegis of TNTB & ESC, attempts to highlight voices and literary contributions of writers from Adi Dravidar & tribal communities.
(Thanks to the publishers for providing a review copy in return for an honest opinion)
